Anthony Davies

Wealth of Negations, Please Take Generously. (The past: domestic violence. The present: anxiety attack. The future: desertion, mutiny or more of the same? Place your bets), Billboard poster for Utopian Pulse-Flares in the Darkroom at Secession, Vienna, 2014. [1]

Anthony Davies (b 1965) is a London based writer, independent researcher and organiser, currently working in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins College, and with the Wealth of Negations group, coordinating communications for the migrant-led Cleaners & Allied Independent Workers Union (CAIWU).

As a writer on art, politics and economics Davies has published in numerous journals. In the late 1990s, along with Simon Ford, he developed a series of critical debates on young British art (yBa) and the Creative Industries, introducing the dystopian figure of the cultural entrepreneur or ‘Culturepreneur’. This was followed by a series of articles in Mute Magazine on the neoliberal transformation of cultural and educational institutions and later texts including "There is No Alternative: The Future is Self-Organised Parts 1 & 2", co-written with Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen, can be found in various publications.

In addition to Wealth of Negations, Davies is also a founder member of MayDay Rooms (2011-2016), an educational charity based in London and set up as a safe haven for historical material linked to social movements and experimental culture. He has co-organised or participated in a range of self-organised initiatives including Posterstudio, Infopool, Copenhagen Free University, Flaxman Lodge, The School of Walls and Space [2], social-crisis-social, Rosa Kerosene and 10th Floor. More recently, with James Stevens and Reverso, he set up a DIY wireless communications and self-archiving platform with autonomous cultural spaces in the Peripheries/Favelas and Workers Occupied Houses of São Paulo, Brazil - culminating in a series of events Distributed Spaces 1-5 and Vagabundo Social, an online international forum over the period 2020-2022.

Publications

• "Art Capital" (with Simon Ford), Art Monthly 213, February 1998, pp 1-4. [3]

• "Art Futures" (with Simon Ford), Art Monthly 223, February 1999, pp 9-11. [4]

• "Art Networks. Fin-de-siècle" (with Simon Ford), March 2000.

• "Culture Clubs" (with Simon Ford), Mute 1:18, London, September 2000, pp 23-24.

• "The Surge to Merge Culture with the Economy", Copenhagen Free University 3, Copenhagen, September 2001, 20 pp, PDF.

• "Basic Instinct: Trauma and Retrenchment 2000-4", Mute 1:29, London, February 2005. Republished in The Populism Reader . Sternberg Press 2005. Pp 71-82. And Producta50. An Introduction to some of the relations between culture and the economy. YProductions. 2007. Pp 62-75

• "Take Me I'm Yours: Neoliberalising the Cultural Institution", Mute 2:5, April 2007. [5]

• "There is No Alternative: The Future is Self-Organised. Part 1" (with Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen), June 2005. Republished in; Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations. Black Dog Publishing, London and Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art. 2007. pp 176-179; Andreas Fogarasi, Kultur und Freizeit: Hungarian Pavilion, Venice. Walter König, 2007; Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader PDF. Tate Publishing and Afterall. 2007. Pp 378-381; Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo (1975–1979). Artists Space New York. 2011 pp; Micro-Historias Y Macro-Mundos, Vol.3 (PDF). Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. 2011; Nossa Voz. No 1018 (PDF Portuguese). Casa do Povo. Sao Paulo, Brazil. December 2017 – January 2018; Arte e ativismo: antologia. MASP and Afterall. 2021. pp 404-417

• "Flaxman Lodge. What a Waste". Frozen Tears 3 . Article Press. 2007. pp 529-539.

• "There is No Alternative: The Future is (Self-)Organised. Part 2" (with Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen), February 2012.

• "Notes on Art and Finance". Stanley Picker Gallery Public Lectures on Art . Centre for Useless Splendour. 2010

• "Burn Baby Burn" in The Potosi Principle. How Can We Sing the Song of the Lord in an Alien Land Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2010. pp 256-259.

• "The Plan. Interview with Steve Sprung". Chapter 3. Political contexts of 1970's Independent Filmmaking. Other Cinemas. Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970's . I.B. Tauris. 2017. pp 56-72.

• "Catch me I’m Falling" (TIPPA, CVA Group and Wealth of Negations 2010-2014) Potosí Principle Archive: Volume 1-4 Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2022

• Terms and Conditions: Welfare Edition, London: Wealth of Negations, March 2012, 46 pp.

• Terms and Conditions: Management Edition, London: Wealth of Negations, March 2013, 51 pp.

Links

• Wealth of Negations

• Vagabundo Social, [6]